Submitted
by
Anonymous Coward
on Wednesday September 10, 2014 @06:02AM

An anonymous reader writes: Apple has built a payment system by first rolling out the “second factor”—the biometric Touch ID—and then by rolling out the first factor: the payment application and API. They have spent a couple years acquainting themselves with the really hard bit: biometrics. Now they can do the easy bit: payments. Everyone else has gone about it in reverse order. The Americans rolled out an easy-to-use payment network. All attempts to add additional security look harder to use than the status quo.

Apple sold the public on the ease-of-use and reliability of the Touch ID, then they applied it to payments. It will be multi-factor, but not using the two traditional factors (something you have, something you know). Instead, it will be using something you have (the phone) and something you are (an authorised fingerprint). The remarkable part of this plan was getting the fingerprint biometric adopted by millions of users first. Once that hurdle was cleared, adapting it to payments was a straightforward exercise built around years of experience with biometrics.